Virtual Gallery Shows Duchamp’s Urinal and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With

Wyndham Lewis's Missing Cabaret Art

What happened: Originally commissioned in 1912 as a piece that would greet revelers at a London cabaret club called the Cave of the Golden Calf, the artist eventually reclaimed his work. A few years later he sold Kermesse for a desperately needed 70 pounds to an American collector. The piece went up for auction after the collector's death and was bought by a friend of Lewis's named Captain Richard Wyndham. After Wyndham felt he was slighted by Lewis in his novel The Apes of God in 1930, he decided to get rid of two of Lewis's paintings, and it is thought Karmesse was one of them. Instead of selling them on the art market, he took out a newspaper ad. From there it is not known if the painting was sold or put into storage.

Status Update: No photographs of Karmesse exist, nor do any known preliminary drawings. The only indication we have of what it looks like is a cigarette-box sized sketch by an artist named Horace Brodzky done in 1917 showing someone looking at the painting (above).

Image courtesy of the Estate of Horace Brodzky, supplied by the Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2011

Robert Smithson's Buried Woodshed

What happened: Land artist Smithson made this wood shed piece (above) with the help of students at Kent State University during a one-week residency there in 1970. He gifted the piece to the university when it was completed, along with instructions for how it was to be cared for – allowing for decay to be part of the piece's evolution. However, just a few months later the Kent State shootings happened and "MAY 4 KENT 70" were painted on the side of the structure, making it an unofficial memorial. And in subsequent years its contents were stolen and half of the shed was burned down by someone using a pop can filled with kerosene. In the early 1980s the central beam broke and in 1984 most of the wood was removed, leaving only part of the foundation.

The Kandinsky Lost in World War II

What happened: Kandinsky's personal records show that he completed the piece in 1910 and it was exhibited widely for the next two years before being acquired by a man named Hans Arp, who took it with him to Switzerland during World War I. Some time later the piece was transferred to a businessman named Otto Ralfs, who was known for promoting Swiss artwork throughout Germany. With Hitler's rise to power Ralfs ceased to promote modern art, even though he kept a sizeable collection at his Braunschweig home. In October 1944 a British air raid leveled much of the city, including Ralfs's home and his art collection.

Status Update: Gone forever. The photo above remains.

Image: Wassily Kandinsky

The Removal of the Great Arc of Serra

What happened:Tilted Arc was commissioned to be placed outside government buildings in the Federal Plaza in New York in 1981. The 12-foot-tall, 120-foot-long sculpture was controversial from the beginning. The New York Times called it a "bullying piece that may conceivably be the ugliest outdoor work of art in the city." Following a public hearing where many people spoke in support of the sculpture (and many against it), a panel voted to relocate the Tilted Arc. It was removed in March 1989 (above).

Status Update: Its remains are in storage.

Photo courtesy Trina McKeever, Richard Serra Studio

Fire Takes Everyone I Have Ever Slept With

What happened: In 1995 British artist Tracey Emin made a tent with all the names of everyone she'd ever slept with, including platonic sleepover guests like friends and her twin brother. (It also included designations for the fetuses of the artist's two abortions.) It became a famous example of the 1990s British art scene, but was lost in an East London warehouse fire in 2004.

Status Update: Gone forever.

Photo: Stephen White/Courtesy Jay Jopling, White Cube

De Kooning, Erased

What happened: In the early 1950s artist Robert Rauschenberg was intent on the idea that he could make art from erasing another artist's work. He got his wish when Willem de Kooning gave him a piece to work with. It reportedly took Rauschenberg two months to complete his removal, and even then some of the original work remained. ("I wore out a lot of erasers," he reportedly said.) Eventually, Erased de Kooning Drawing (above) was born.

Status Update: Still erased. Though in 2009 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art did a partial digital reconstruction (it can be viewed in the Gallery of Lost Art).

Photo: Ben Blackwell

Out of The Trench, Into the Ether

What happened: Otto Dix spent hours in the trenches sketching during his time as soldier in World War I, and a few years after he returned home he completed The Trench (above) – a massive canvas that took him three years to finish. When the Nazis came to power the work was deemed repellant. For a long time it was believed that The Trench was burned in Berlin in 1939, but later a bill of sale was found that was believed to have been for the painting. But it's unclear what happened to the piece after that.

Status Update: Most believe The Trench was destroyed.

Image courtesy SLUB Dresden / Deutsche Fotothek

Not every great work of art finds its way into a museum or some filthy rich collector’s living room. Some are lost, others destroyed. But even art that doesn’t exist now has a gallery all its own.

The Gallery of Lost Art creates an exhibit of works that will never be seen in museums. The virtual gallery, which went live this summer and will add new pieces until the end of the year, collects works by more than 40 artists spanning the last century and shares stories of how they were created and how they were lost, stolen, destroyed, erased, or otherwise rendered irretrievable. For example, the urinal Marcel Duchamp used for the Fountain was lost amid the controversy that ensued when the Society of Independent Artists rejected it in 1917. The “Fountain“s you see in museums today are replicas Duchamp began releasing in the mid-20th century.

“The Gallery of Lost Art could only exist as a digital project, not just because the artworks are now missing and so could not be brought together in a physical space, but also because working in the digital space allowed us to choose artworks that, while they were extant, were sited in different parts of the world or could never be shown in any gallery,” curator Jennifer Mundy said in an e-mail to Wired.

‘The Gallery of Lost Art could only exist as a digital project.’

— Jennifer Mundy, curator

The interactive gallery is laid out like a massive curator’s space (or, as the Guardian noted, a crime scene investigation) with tables laid out with images of the missing works (or images of what they used to look like) along with their back stories. Archival video, interviews and images are also provided to explain what happened to the works from artists like Frida Kahlo and Willem de Kooning. (Duchamp’s urinal, for example, is accompanied by a 1917 photo, by Alfred Stieglitz, of the lost original.)

The idea, the creators claim, is to show not how easy it is for a valuable piece of art to be lost forever, but also to show the forms loss can take, like getting lost in a fire – Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 – 1995 — or actually getting altered by another artist – an Untitled work by de Kooning in the gallery was erased by Robert Rauchenberg in 1953 to create Erased de Kooning Drawing.